I know how it is when you first venture into the virtual workforce. It can be confusing, scary, and intimidating. The first opportunities you’ll encounter are scammy marketers, survey sites, and websites like Elance that pays $2 per hour. This can get old really quick and you find that it’s not worth the pennies you’ll be making. When I first attempted to work from home, I was caught up in a flurry of work at home scams from Craigslist and misleading data entry jobs with promises of overnight riches. I thought the only people making money were the scammers selling poor fools dreams of getting rich off the internet. I didn’t touch any virtual work for another 4 years. Now I can easily make $400-$500 a month working online part-time if I really hustle. It usually takes me about 15 hours per week to make this. This may not seem like a lot of work but when you’re already a full time student working at a 30 hour per week internship, it’s a lot of work!

You can do this too!

Photo Credit: aoirostudio.com

The problem most people have is that they don’t know what opportunities are in front of them and they don’t take the time to look for them either. Well you’re in luck because after many many hours of research, I’m able to bring to you this wonderful list of work at home sites that are free to join. These sites are like Elance and Odesk but they don’t have so much international competition driving down the prices. These sites are popping up everyday and because of their novelty, there’s not as much competition making it a lot easier to get work.

Many people complain that they cannot get a job because they have no work experience. I have good news: you’ve done more than you think! If you ever held a leadership position then you have experience in the skills that employers are looking for! Here are a few ways to break into the professional work force.

Administrative Assistant: Volunteer! You can volunteer at your local food bank doing administrative work. After you get about 6 months under your belt you can start applying for real administrative positions.

Waitress: Once Again. Volunteer. Atlanta’s Center for Self Sufficiency has a restaurant for its members in which volunteers serve food. My friend used this experience to get a job as a waitress.

Project Management: Volunteer to manage campus events at your school. Become the event manager for a club or organization. Obtain a community relations internship in which you have to organize groups.

Social Media Marketing: Contact a popular person on social media or even one your friends and volunteer to promote their event, brand, or product for free. Start your own brand, blog, or product and become active on social media. Write a social media marketing campaign and complete it!

Teacher: Tutor students in your class or volunteer to tutor in the Math Lab or Writing Lab at your school.

Programmer: Look on free sites that teach you HTML, SQL, CSS, C++, Java, and other popular programming languages. Start a website that you can post your projects on as a portfolio. If you want and have the money to you can study to become certified in most languages.

Medical Professional: Shadowing nurses, doctors, and other professional can give you an insight into the life of a medical professional. Not to mention it is definitely necessary to shadow a doctor if you want to apply to medical school.

Accounting: Learn Excel and Quickbooks online. Lynda.com is an excellent resource for this. Become the treasurer in a club or organization.

Get involved in as many organizations as you can on and off campus. Many professional organizations have networking opportunities as well as mentoring. Knowing someone in the field you are looking to enter is your most valuable asset when looking for a job.

1. Hire My Mom- Love, love, love this website. This is where I got my start and the inspiration for this website! It’s a job board aimed at stay at home moms. You have to have at least one year of professional experience. Don’t undermine yourself though! If you served on board a committee or held a student governmental position at your university, you can use the skills learned there as professional experience. Find things you might have done while volunteering that would be considered as professional experience to qualify for this. There is a small fee: $29.99 every 3 months. This comes out to $120 per year or $10 per month. Pretty Affordable!

2. Elance- I like this website because I was able to find other virtual assistants to help me with my clients pretty quickly! While I never worked a job on Elance personally it has literally thousands of jobs. This is good if you know a bit about programming because those jobs usually pay a bit more. It is free to join and they do offer protection payment if you complete the work in “Work View” which is a box on the website in which they monitor the hours you worked on a project as a way of verifying your time.

3. Fiverr: I love Fiverr because you can literally make money doing ANYTHING on this site. The only downfall is that you have to work for really low wages ($5 per task or per hour) just to compete. You can do something fun and funky like draw caricatures or make goofy songs for people for $5. Actually the more unique the gig (what a task on Fiverr is called) the more popular it is! Again this website is free.

4. iWriter- I just joined this website but it is an easy way to make money if you can write interesting articles quickly. It’s a writing content website and you pick a topic among many and write a 250-1000 word article. When you start you’re only able to choose the standard articles which run about $2 a pop. I know that’s like 3rd world country low but once you’ve done 30 articles AND received at least a 4 1/2 star rating you can choose the premium and then the elite articles which are from $4-$8 per article. If you are a premium writer and can write 2 articles per hour that’s $16 per hour. Not bad.

5. Inbox Dollars- I hate all other survey sites except for Inbox Dollars. They give you $5 to sign up and they don’t make you work too hard for the money. It’s $30 to receive a check. In the first couple of weeks I made about $40 doing offers and surveys. The trick is to do the trial memberships and mark yourself a reminder in your email to cancel it before the trial runs out. You can get $5-$20 for the trial memberships just make sure to sign up with the same email you used to sign up with Inbox Dollars. Also wait at least 48 hours before you cancel your membership or you may run the risk of not receiving your money.

You do have options-find another job! Many people simply don’t have the time to search for jobs, tailor their resume, and then send it out to dozens of employers. Just the thought of beginning a job search can make procrastination rear it’s ugly head-ugh!

Again, you have options. For just $5 this complete your job search gig by proassistblog can help you start looking for a new career without actually having to do any work.

Here’s what you get

A personalized job search tailored to your qualifications

Free profile set-up with LinkedIn, Career Builder, and Monster

Application to at least 20 jobs that match your skills

An uber-useful gig

Get professional help from a professional gal and get a leg up in your career search. Proassistblog also has a resume writing gig as well as a mock interview via Skype gig to complete your job searching needs. Save yourself time, money, and start making a change today with this useful gig!

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